Field of graves

Ellison offers a prequel to her popular Taylor Jackson and Samantha Owens series (What Lies Behind, 2015). Nashville police lieutenant Jackson is struggling with departmental strife after shooting one of her own detectives in self-defense. She's forced to refocus when a killer stages a Vanderbilt coed's body in the Centennial Park Parthenon. Jackson's best friend, medical examiner Owens, finds perplexing ritualistic evidence: the killer sprinkled the body with herbs, and the young woman's liver showed signs of aconite poisoning. FBI profiler John Baldwin, on self-imposed exile in Nashville, is convinced to join Taylor's team, and he and Taylor wrestle with intense attraction as they work to decipher the killer's motivation and race to find another missing Vanderbilt student. The main draw here for series fans will be the backstory provided about the popular lead characters, but the serial-killer plot itself is unremarkable.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist

This eighth edition of Ellison's chronicles of Nashville homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson is a series prequel, in which Taylor and FBI profiler Dr. John Baldwin meet and begin their now long-established relationship. The duo is searching for a lunatic who impregnates and then kills Vanderbilt University students, ritually preparing their corpses. Reader Bean begins the tale using a tense voice to describe Taylor's fatal shooting of a crooked cop bent on homicide. John is haunted too, by a profile mistake that resulted in the deaths of three of his associates. He has lost interest in his job but agrees to help identify the madman, mainly motivated by an immediate attraction to Taylor. She's attracted as well. Her speech is tough but feminine, southern accented, defensive, and troubled, but, once she's been introduced to Baldwin, Bean softens Taylor with the character's newfound curiosity and interest. Ellison interrupts the pair's investigation and romance with snapshots of the addled murderer's grim progress. The bad guy's motivation is bizarre, but he sounds both erudite and arrogant, two traits that might tip the audio audience to his connection to the victims, were the audience not puzzled and distracted by his insane activities. A Mira hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A serial killer is on the loose in Nashville and young Vanderbilt University coeds are in danger. Lt. Taylor Jackson and Dr. -Samantha Owens, the medical examiner and Jackson's best friend, face a huge public relations nightmare as worried parents and the general public clamor for results. Worse, one victim is Jordan Blake, the daughter of a Texas oilman and a major university benefactor. As Jackson works with her team to hunt down the culprit, her boss asks her to partner with a troubled FBI profiler. Dr. John Baldwin-a genius at profiling when he's sober-has moved back to Tennessee from DC after an investigation went horribly awry. So now Taylor has to solve a crime and babysit a wounded colleague. VERDICT Followers of this series (Where All the Dead Lie) will relish the revelations of how Ellison's protagonists first connected. New readers of this page-turning, suspenseful thriller, will want to catch up on the author's other books.-Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.